The economy requires well-paid workers

Examiner contributor Dan Curtin is director of the California State Council of Carpenters.

Published 4:00 am, Monday, August 5, 1996

1996-08-05 04:00:00 PDT UNITED STATES -- Sacramento

INFLATION under control, unemployment dropping. If everything's so good, why does Labor Secretary Robert Reich refer to working people as the "anxious class" ?

A Census Bureau study gives us the answer. The gap between the rich and the rest of society has widened since 1968. Worse, it's gotten dramatically wider in the last few years, under a Democratic president.

We now have the industrial world's largest wealth gap while workers' wages, in terms of actual buying power, have been on a steady, decades-long decline. So where do workers turn?

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For a brief political moment, an unlikely voice trumpeted worker issues. But Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan's fiery rhetoric of "peasants with pitch forks" had an Alice in Wonderland ring to it.

Buchanan hid his racial and religious intolerance with a large dose of populism, but he shed a welcome light on the key issue of our time: the decline in real wages and the enormous wealth gap.

Wall Street and the bond markets can rest easy. By consensus of both major political parties, corporate interests will continue to drive American economic policy. America's "silent depression," 20 years of declining wages for 80 percent of the work force and the loss of millions of middle-class jobs, goes unaddressed.

How else can one explain the chill sent through Wall Street by the news of hundreds of thousands of new jobs and reduced unemployment? Why isn't good news for working Americans good news for all Americans?

By simply putting the brakes on the Republican

"revolution" spurred by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Clinton earns the support of working people.

He protected worker safety and health laws. He waged a valiant fight against the permanent replacement of strikers. He defends prevailing wage laws for skilled construction workers and supports increasing the minimum wage.

But Clinton has danced lightly around our real dilemma, the one so rudely tossed up by Buchanan, this year's political descendant of George Wallace: what to do about the 80 percent of the American public, the "peasants with pitchforks," who haven't been invited to the economic party?

Clinton must realize he sits astride a three-legged stool with only two legs.

We cannot lead the world economy and provide for our citizens with only a business-government partnership.

Without labor, we are lost. America's workers, particularly union workers, are the middle-class consumers that drive our economy. A healthy American middle class will be the engine that drives the 21st century's global economy.

Unfortunately, most corporations take the low road: drive U.S. wages lower or relocate to low wages in other countries. This strategy means short-term profits but long-term disaster. The result will be the destruction of America's middle class.

Our strategy must be to challenge our competitors, the Japanese and European economies, on their own terms. A high-skill, high-quality, high-productivity contest is one we can win. We have the natural resources, the educational and economic infrastructure - and the know-how.

Decent wages that can support middle-class life for American families must be part of that formula. Labor, the third leg of the stool, must be part of an economic strategy that allows working people to share in our national goals.

Workers must have the ability to obtain their fair share of the national wealth. Until all Americans benefit from economic growth, the American dream, as we remember it, will be a thing of the past.&lt;